New study finds only 1 in 3 Americans want to get married (VIDEO)

A new study has found that only one-third of Americans definitely want to get married.

Credit:

Mark Metcalfe

A new study has found that only one in three single American adults want to get married, USA Today reported.

The second annual Singles in America Survey, conducted by Match.com, interviewed 5,541 men and women across the country who have never been married, divorced or widowed. It found that only 34.5 percent of singles were definitely interested in marriage.

Among singles 21 and older, 27 percent said they didn't want to get married, while roughly 40 percent were uncertain whether they did or not, according to the report.

The study was developed by the Institute for Evolutionary Studies at Binghamton University, along with biological anthropologist Helen Fisher and sex therapist Laura Berman, USA Today reported.

"It is true that researchers used to find that people who hadn't gotten married still had aspirations to get married, but I think that may be eroding now," sociologist Michael Rosenfeld of Stanford University told USA Today. "A new generation has grown up in a world where marriage is not a certainty. If they're 20 years into adult relationships and haven't found somebody they want to marry, maybe they've changed their minds about how necessary marriage is."

The survey also asked questions about love, sex and relationships, such as “How long do you take to get over a break up?” to “Who has more orgasms, Republicans or Democrats?”

The study found that the top five deal-breakers in order of importance are having a disheveled or unclean appearance (67 percent), being lazy (66 percent), being too needy (63 percent), lacking a sense of humor (54 percent), and living more than three hours apart (49 percent), Slate reported.

According to the Pew Research Center, barely half of adults in the United States are currently married, a record low.

Sociologists Naomi Gerstel of UMass Amherst and Natalia Sarkisian of Boston College have found that unmarried adults contribute far more to society than their married counterparts, Boston Magazine reported. Using data from the General Social Survey and the National Survey of Families and Households, they found that never-married women were more politically active than their married counterparts, and that, in general, the unmarried are more engaged with their neighbors than married couples, and have stronger networks of family and friends.

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